ganja

When Erik Christiansen started smoking pot, he became fascinated by the look of different marijuana strains. But the photographs of marijuana he saw didn’t capture the variety, reports NPR.org.

So he went to the hardware store and picked up two lights and a cardboard box. “I didn’t even have a macro lens — I was shooting through a magnifying glass,” he says.

Christiansen has created high-resolution 360-degree views of some strains of marijuana, including this one of Platinum Bubba.

Credit: Courtesy of Erik Christiansen

The California-based photographer tinkered with his macro technique until he had created a consistent way to capture highly detailed images of marijuana.

Then Dan Michaels, a cannabis aficionado and strategist for the growing legal pot industry, contacted Christiansen about collaborating on a field guide. The result is Green: A Field Guide to Marijuana (Chronicle Books, $30). The high-end coffee table book documents over 170 strains of cannabis, explaining their medicinal and recreational attributes. (Though it’s worth noting that the medicinal benefits are based on subjective reports rather than randomized clinical trials.)

KINGSTON, Jamaica – Jamaica’s Cabinet has approved a bill that would decriminalize possession of small amounts of pot and establish a legal medical marijuana industry, reports The Guardian and The Associated Press.

Justice Minister Mark Golding announced Wednesday that he expects to introduce the drug law amendments in the Senate by the end of this week.

Golding says it would establish a licensing authority to create regulations covering growing, distributing and selling marijuana for “medical, scientific and therapeutic purposes.”

Debate could start this month in the country where the drug, known popularly as “ganja,” has long been culturally entrenched but illegal, reports The Guardian.

“We need to position ourselves to take advantage of the significant economic opportunities offered by this emerging industry,” he said.

The bill would make possession of 2 ounces (56g) or less an offense that would not result in a criminal record. Cultivation of five or fewer plants on any premises would be permitted.

Rastafarians, who use marijuana as a sacrament, could also legally use it for religious purposes for the first time in Jamaica, where the spiritual movement was founded in the 1930s.

For decades, debate has raged on the Caribbean island over laws governing marijuana use. But now, with several countries and US states relaxing their laws on the herb, Jamaica is advancing reform plans.

Golding said the government would not soften its stance on drug trafficking and it intended to use a proportion of revenues from its licensing authority to support a public education campaign to discourage pot-smoking by young people and mitigate public health consequences.

The director of the national Cannabis Commercial and Medicinal Research Taskforce said he expected the bill to be passed soon in parliament, where Portia Simpson Miller’s governing party holds a 2-1 majority. “This development is long overdue,” Delano Seiveright said.

Patrons smoke e-cigarettes at the Henley Vaporium in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Dec. 28, 2013. A proliferation of new words to describe e-cigarettes and a marijuana industry newly legalized in some states shows two competing impulses — the informality of drug culture and the quest for business legitimacy. (Katie Orlinsky/The New York Times)

“Back in my day, it was just weed; it was just getting high,” said Joel Schneider, 55, sipping a cup of coffee. “Vaping? No. We’d never heard of vaping.”

Schneider, the owner of a pot-friendly bed-and-breakfast in Denver (it brands itself a “bud-and-breakfast”), had just learned that “vape” was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries 2014 Word of the Year. That is, a group of lexicographers got together and measured the word’s use, determining that the term – used to describe the process of inhaling and exhaling the vapor produced by an electronic cigarette (or “vape pen”) – had proliferated, along with the habit. (Last year’s word of the year was “selfie.”)

“The growing popularity of e-cigarettes, combined with the legal cannabis industry, created a perfect storm,” said Katherine Martin, a lexicographer involved in the selection.

Yet “vape” is only the tip of the linguistic iceberg, at least when it comes to marijuana. Spend a few days in Colorado, where pot has been legal since January, and you stand to end up tongue-tied more than once. Weed? Nope. It’s now “cannabis,” a subtler term. “Smoking” has become “consuming,” or, if it’s with a vaporizer, “vaping.” Pot itself is often referred to as “product,” and the industry is referred to as the “cannabusiness.”

“There is definitely a new vernacular that comes with the dawn of mainstream cannabis,” said Andy Juett, a Denver comedian who runs a pot-themed show. “There, I just did it: I wouldn’t have even used the word ‘cannabis’ two years ago.”

Call it cannaslang. Linguists say its evolution is not particularly surprising: Drugs have long produced a casual lexicon. There are at least 200 synonyms

for the word “drunk,” as chronicled as early as 1737 in something called The Drinkers Dictionary.

Yet when it comes to pot, the new terminology goes beyond describing the high (though, indeed, “green out” is the new “black out”). There are now terms for the business (pot entrepreneurs are “ganjapreneurs”) and its sociology (bias against stoners is “cannabigotry”). The act of disliking a person who vapes is called “vape vitriol”; “cannasseur” refers to a pot connoisseur.

Some of the words are silly, but others are strategic: a way to give pot some class.

“We work very hard to mature the messaging and vernacular of this industry,” said David Kochman, a lawyer for OpenVape, a Denver-based company that manufactures vaporizers.

He notes that “buds” are now referred to as “flowers,” and “trim” (the leftover parts of a marijuana plant once the flowers are removed) is “raw material.”

As for vaping, the word itself appears to date back to 1983, according to Oxford, when it was used in a scholarly article to describe “an inhaler or ‘noncombustible’ cigarette” that looked “much like the real thing” but delivered nicotine through a vapor. It would be a decade before it would catch on, appearing in online forums amid the jargon of marijuana. Yet even a few years ago, if you heard the word, you might have been more likely to think “Star Trek” than e-cigarette, said Axie Blundon, OpenVape’s social media director.